Bookshelves at Legend Press

The Legend Press website has been running a series of posts, this last month, featuring the bookshelves of their authors, as well as of the Legend Press team themselves.  You can find mine here.

James Laidler book launch

I was delighted to be able to help James Laidler launch his second novel, Pulling Down the Stars (published by Hybrid) in Warrnambool last night.  Following my brief introductory talk, James discussed the process of writing this novel - always fascinating as each author seems to approach their work in a different way - and the influence living in East Timor had on him.

I reviewed James' first novel The Taste of Apple for a print edition of The View From Here, a copy of which you can now find on James' website here.  While The Taste of Apple was ambitiously (and successfully) told in over 170 poems, I'm intrigued to see how the more prosaic Pulling Down the Stars works - although it soon became evident last night that there's some wonderfully lyrical prose woven throughout.  I look forward to reading it.

For those people in Melbourne this weekend, there'll be a second book launch in Readings bookshop (701 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn) on Sunday, 10th February at 2:00pm.

A book trailer for Pulling Down the Stars can also be found at the James Laidler website.

The Green Man

After researching Leafy George (a.k.a. The Green Man) for The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore, I ended up with a strong image in my head of what he looked like, and of what the corbel stone motif above Kate Hainley's house would look like.  Imagine my delight when I unwrapped a gift sent to me from the UK recently and found him grinning at me.

He now greets me every time I leave the back door.  His is a slightly manic presence - the oak-leafed image of a benign tree spirit or demigod, albeit one with a dark and mischievous streak.  He reminds me to look up at the trees whenever I walk or work in my garden.

I have it in mind to track down a duplicate and position him next to the front door of the house as a greeting to visitors.

Up Yours, George Bernard Shaw! Teaching - A Grounding for Writers

I wrote this article for Idiom, the magazine of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. It appeared in Volume 47, #3, 2011.

*

To begin, let me make one thing clear: I never wanted to be a teacher.  Not at all.  What persuaded me to give it a go was the television adaptation of R.F.Delderfield’s To serve Them All My Days, with its wonderfully idealistic view of changing education from within.  Up until that point, it had never been a career option – my dislike of practically everything associated with school was profound – and to anyone who suggested it, I’d say: ‘Teaching is the last thing I’ll do.’  These days, after chalking up almost thirty years in English, Welsh, South Australian and Victorian classrooms, I hope it isn’t.  I hope there’s life after teaching... and am beginning to suspect there is.

What I always wanted to do was write.  It was that simple.  Novels, short stories, plays, poetry, screenplays – I wasn’t fussy as long as I was writing.  However, at 24, and with enough rejection slips from publishers to paper a small wall, the pragmatic me accepted I had to earn a living, while the idealistic me decided this would have to involve something socially worthwhile (not a matter of generating vast profits for banks and multinationals, nor creating landfill).  Not only that, but whatever I was engaged in from 9-5 (ha!) shouldn’t stifle my need to write, but should positively feed it instead.  From there, it wasn’t such a massive leap to apply for a Post-Grad Certificate in Education, especially with R.F.Delderfield’s romantic view of teaching being screened weekly.  To hell with George Bernard Shaw and his ‘He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches.’

It’s a decision I’ve regretted at times.  Especially when interminable meetings and endless piles of correction compress one evening after another into only a few minutes of freedom, and when the announcement of yet another ‘Department initiative’ doesn’t so much excite me as remind me to ‘do oxymorons’ with my next class.  However, there’s also been many occasions when I’ve recognised what a smart move it was.

On the whole, teaching has been a worthwhile career and, even though I don’t feel I’ve radically changed institutionalised education from within – more’s the pity – I still feel that I’ve been meaningfully employed in pursuit of something I can believe in, and that, for a few moments of their lives, I may have had a positive influence on one or two students.  While this may seem like a stark reduction, these are elements that have remained important to me nonetheless.  That being said, if I skim too quickly over the joys and frustrations of teaching, it’s because I really want to reflect on whether it was a smart move to enter the teaching profession from an aspiring writer’s point of view... or whether it would have made more sense to work in a bookshop, or as a journalist, or as a bank teller, or manufacturing landfill.

As far as writing is concerned, I didn’t experience any tangible success for many years.  It’s only since 2007 that I’ve been fortunate enough to have two novels published, along with a short story in a paperback anthology, which in turn generated an opportunity to write regularly for a literary magazine.  Without this success, I might argue that teaching got utterly and completely in the way of writing, but four years can make a lot of difference to a person’s outlook, and I’m now in a position where I can recognise what a sound grounding in writing my day job has provided.

Both professions require a degree of stoicism.  Writing novels is fun and relatively easy, but getting them published can be hard and dispiriting.  Publishing houses, as businesses, are conservative and jittery.  For every doorstop-sized manuscript I’ve sent for consideration (and there’s been a few), and for each batch of two-line rejection slips I’ve received in return, I can’t think of a time when at least one of those brief slips hasn’t excused the failure to offer me a three-book contract and a six-figure advance on the grounds that the industry was in a state of collapse.  It seems this is the way publishing always has been and always will be, and maybe – just maybe – working for various resource-starved schools has helped harden me to this and develop a greater sense of resilience than might otherwise have been the case.  Besides, rejection comes in a variety of shapes, and anyone who’s got the patience to work with angry and hyper-critical thirteen-year-olds on a daily basis has to be both resilient and optimistic... or totally insane.  But this is the least of it. 

The biggest advantage of being an English and Literature teacher, as well as a writer, is that, on the one hand, it’s obliged me to regularly reflect on the processes involved in writing, while, on the other hand, it’s exposed me to a broader range of literary texts – and views about those texts – than I could possibly have been exposed to in any other work environment.  I can’t think of another job that would have kept me attuned to both these areas to quite the same extent.

Left alone, our reading preferences are shaped by a number of factors (the bookshops we visit, the reviews and interviews we happen upon, what our friends and family members are reading, our taste in book covers), but being a teacher is like belonging to a rather strict Book Group: every year, curriculum changes oblige us to read texts we might never have otherwise picked up, and every new class requires exploring these texts in different ways.  I delight in this.  Besides all the other responses these texts elicit, each one – good and bad, enjoyed or disliked – engages me as a writer and makes me reflect on different aspects of crafting stories.  And even though a quirk of one British school’s syllabus, coupled with an enduring appreciation of this particular novella, means that I’ve read and discussed John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men well in excess of twenty times, it continues to influence the way I think about writing.  Similarly, although I enjoyed Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café when I read it at university many years ago, I’m not convinced that I’d have found my way to The Member of the Wedding in a hurry if it hadn’t been placed on the text list for VCE English this year.  But I’m grateful it was, for here’s another novel which, as I read, re-read and helped shape class discussions about it, the writer-part of my brain found itself scrambling to run another edit of the novel I was working on at the time.  How could I possibly saturate myself in McCullers’ rich, lyrical prose without being affected by it?

Each novel, film, play, anthology of poems or short stories, offers something of itself, whether in the quality of its language, the use of a particular motif, its structure, character development, pace, narrative voice, or the ideas it concerns itself with, and while I might approach each text as a teacher, I inevitably learn a considerable amount as a writer.  Slaughterhouse-5, Triage, Catcher in the Rye, Chinatown, On the Waterfront, Stand By Me, Radiance, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Macbeth, Jennifer Strauss, John Donne, e.e.cummings, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Tim Winton... if I listed every single text, poet and author here that I’ve not only got a kick out of teaching, but that’s also had an impact on how I think about writing, then I’d have to steal another page or two.  Sometimes I think we underestimate what we learn from teaching.

Good teaching is rarely a one-way process, and the most successful classes for me are those where I’m not only helping students to develop as independent learners, but where their individual questions, comments and needs challenge me as an independent learner too.  Nowhere have I experienced this reciprocity more keenly than when engaging students in thinking about the way they use language, the conventions associated with different forms of writing, and the ideas they’re trying to convey.  This is particularly true in VCE English and Literature, where so much time can be legitimately spent fermenting and distilling the ideas that grow from texts, as well as looking at the ways in which those texts are shaped, that inevitably one’s own thinking and writing becomes clarified by the process.

And finally, because in every writer is a story-teller, and story-telling is about performance and entertainment as much as anything else, teaching provides a pleasant antidote to the insularity of writing – the loneliness of the long distance writer.  On average, it takes me about three years to write a novel, which is three years without an audience, whereas teaching offers me an opportunity to perform every day, and the opportunity to interact with people who are somewhat different to the characters skulking around in my head.

Kick out the deadly meetings, the endless correction and a few ‘Departmental initiatives’, and I’ll have achieved a fine balance between teaching and writing.  I’ll bite my thumb at George Bernard Shaw, hope my books don’t generate too much landfill, and salute R.F.Delderfield.

New Year oddity

Last New Year was marked by the discovery of Percy the Puffer Fish, who you can find here.  2013, however, seems set to be the year of the snake and the magpie.

Walking back from the beach on New Year's Day, I (wisely) stopped to give way to a sizeable brown snake slithering across the grass and path.  More remarkable though was the magpie that alerted me to its presence.  The maggie had decided this was the biggest and juiciest worm it had ever seen, I guess, because it was striding alongside the thing, trying to peck at it.  Every now and then, snakey would decide enough was enough and would rear up and strike at maggie, who would squawk and flap out of the way, only to land and have another go.

Persistent, valiant  or stupid, I'm not quite sure.

Very hot, summer days here at the moment - scoring a massive 48 degrees on the back veranda last Friday - perfect for lazing in the hammock and reading, and for getting Number Four under way.

Recent reads include Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.  Both in delicious hard copy - haven't picked up the Kindle for a few months - and both immensely enjoyable.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

The following piece was written for Legend Press' Advent Calendar, where it appeared a couple of weeks ago.

I remember only one sprinkling of Christmas snow during my 32 years of living in Britain, and grey drizzle washed that out in hours.  However, Christmas has always been a pagan festival for me and so every year, even as an adult, I’d hope for a rejuvenating, wintry blanket of the stuff.  It’s not something I’m likely to see these days, living on the south coast of Australia, and although I might feel ambivalent about dressing a Christmas tree during the heat of summer (frosted baubles, icy tinsel, sprigs of holly and mistletoe), I’ve reconciled myself to Christmas lunches beneath the shade of the grapevine, sipping chilled white wine and eating oysters, instead of carving roast turkey by an open fire.  My Australian Christmas is deliciously hedonistic and pagan, and I’m glad we can improvise rituals and ceremonies to suit our environment.  All the same, I still hanker on occasion for a white Christmas.  There’s something magical about such a prospect, and not just for the child I once was either. 
 
Many years ago, when I was studying at University of Wales in Cardiff and living in Senghenydd, I stretched out on my settee one Sunday afternoon in January and read two children’s books by Paul Theroux: A Christmas Card and London Snow.  These books drew me in and absorbed me so completely that I wanted to re-read them straightaway.  Both were compelling winter’s tales, evoking nostalgia for the romantic things we associate with Christmas as children, even if we rarely experience them, and it seemed hardly surprising when I looked out the window upon finishing A Christmas Card to see snow falling.  Quite magically.  It made me wish I’d read them on Christmas Eve instead and I promised myself I’d do this next Christmas.

Needless to say I forgot, but two years later, when telling a group of Year 8 students about this, they asked if I’d read them to the class, which I did, and sure enough, that evening it snowed.  They were as delighted as I was, and it proved to them, I hope, the enchantment of good literature. 
 
I’ve read both books many times since, and while they still evoke everything I like and wish from a northern winter, and they’re everything a good winter’s tale should be, they’re unable to bring the snow to me anymore.  Maybe that’s why I wrote a winter’s tale of my own, for adults, and why Christmas and snow became strong motifs in The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore, so I might try and recreate a similar magic for myself and others too.  I hope so.
 
Merry Christmas to you and a happy new year.

Legend Press Advent Calendar

UK publisher Legend Press is running its annual Advent Calendar, featuring many of its authors.  Here's a link to the piece I put together for this year's calendar.  I'm the 16th December!

Have a browse of the Legend Press site and follow the advent calendar up to Christmas.

Down and Out in Melbourne... at the NGV: Radiance - Neo-Impressionists

By chance, I happened to be in Melbourne ten days ago, just in time for the opening of one of the NGV's summer exhibitions: Radiance - The Neo-Impressionists.  Although I've never been a big fan of the paintings from this particular movement - they always seemed too studied, illustrative, lacking in vitality (although wonderfully vibrant in the depiction of light) - it was tremendous to be able to see a hundred works gathered together and to be able to examine the different approaches of the various artists (Signac, Seurat, Cross, Pissaro, Morren, Luce, etc) and to observe the way each individual developed their approach.

The port of Saint-Tropez (1893) Maximilien Luce

While I've always known this movement as Pointillism (from the use of the dot), I learnt that Signac regarded this as a derogatory term and preferred Divisionism to describe the scientific technique he applied.  I was also intrigued to learn about the connection between these artists and the anarchists of the period (Kropotkin's ilk): communal living, harmonious relationship with nature and the like.

I also caught a couple of small exhibitions while at the NGV: Confounding - Contemporary Photography and Ballet & Fashion.  Both worth a visit too.

During my trip I finished reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  I'd never read this before, but was glad I did.  I found it particularly interesting to read Orwell writing with a less polished, less confident voice than appears in his later work, and yet to see that confidence begin to develop in the second (London) half of the book, and in some ways I preferred the rawness of it.  I think it might be my favourite Orwell book.

While I'm scribbling, and it being 28th November, let me wish poet, artist, printer, visionary, William Blake, a happy birthday.  If he'd survived his death, he'd be 255 today!  Happy birthday, Bill.

Returning to the 21st century

The telecommunications hub in nearby Warrnambool, which services all the internet, mobile and landline technology in this area of Victoria, was destroyed in a massive fire last Thursday morning.  Consequently, we've been without internet, phones, access to banking and electronic payment facilities in shops for the last few days, and the population at large has gone into cold turkey over the loss of emails, SMS and Facebook.  This may not only explain why I've been quieter than normal on the blog, but why I've been living off road-kill and shoe-leather stew.  It's all back on now... obviously, which means I've got no excuse not to pay bills or communicate any longer.  I'm not sure whether this is for better or worse, a return to enlightenment or a return to mass ignorance, but I'll embrace it whatever.  Hello again, I bet you didn't know you missed me!

You can read the story here.

PS.  Let me amend that: mobile and internet services are now running, landlines are still down.

Recent reads, Kindle and otherwise

Of late, I've been alternating my reading between real, tactile books and ebooks on a Kindle.  Thought this would be the best way to get a clear sense of what I like or prefer about each.

What I like about having books on a Kindle:

• the digital wizardry of the process and the product - it's a toy I enjoy;
• I can search for a book, find it and download the thing in the space of 30 seconds - especially good if I've started reading a book that doesn't belong to me and I want to carry on with it, or if I'm after a book in a hurry;
• I'm no longer cluttering my shelves with books I'm not particularly attached to (but can still buy hard copies of those I really want);
• they're cheaper than the hard copy, and environmentally sound;
• so many books can be downloaded for free;
• I can take as many books as I'll ever manage to read or need to reference when I'm travelling;
• they're making books fashionable and appealing for a new generation of reader;
• more people are writing, more authors are getting published, the conservative stranglehold of (many) publishing houses is being challenged;
• I can attempt(!) to read books in a foreign language and simply press a word for its definition when I don't understand it.

What I don't like about Kindle books:

• I miss the colour, the texture and the smell of the hard copy, and the tactile experience of holding it and thumbing through the pages, and hearing them snip-snap when I flick at them, and I miss the personal feel of an old favourite that's become dog-eared and faded - that's a big set of things;
• digital books don't give me the same sense of where I'm up to in a story - I like to be able to gauge the progress of a story by where I'm up to in the thickness of the thing, and having this listed as a percentage doesn't cut the mustard;
• I also like to know where I'm up to in terms of a page number (surely that could be managed?) instead of what appears to be a randomly spaced Location number;
• it's irritating when the Kindle jumps a couple of digital pages, or a hundred, and every page has to be digitally turned to get back to the right position;
• only one person can access the library of books on a particular Kindle at a time;
• insufficient quality control of editing - the lack of investment in printing a book might mean that it's too easy and temptingly quick for some publishers and self-publishers to publish digitally;
• I'm less confident about reading in the bath.

What I've read on Kindle recently:

• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - I've wanted to read this for years, so I was pleased I could download it for free on Kindle, but it bored me silly and I had to stop after 24%;
• The Obituarist by Patrick O'Duffy;
• The Brush-Off by Shane Maloney;
• Underground Nest by Kathleen Maher;
• Street by Tyler Stevens;
• Medea by Euripedes - just started;
• Blue Friday by Mike French - just finishing.

What I've read in hard copy recently:

• The Boat by Nam Le;
• The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh;
• The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chödrön;
• When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön;
• The Places That Scare You by Pema Chödrön (- my fourth novel may well have a Zen Bhuddist thread woven through it!);
• The Lady With the Little Dog and other stories by Anton Chekov - for the 3rd or 4th time;
• Black Cow by Magdalena Ball;
• Beginners by Raymond Carver.

While I'll continue to read books in both hard copy and digital format, via a Kindle or similar, my preference for the time-being is firmly with the former.  However, that said, I'll give a resounding three cheers for Kindle, if only because Snowing and Greening seems to be selling superbly in that format.  Cheers to that!